A Confession Amid the Cleaning

Gah!!!

I think I have successfully moved the dirt around the house. I have not actually cleaned, but I have moved it from one area to another. I also have succeeded in jumbling all the downstairs furniture in the laundry area and soaking all the carpets with lukewarm, dirty water and then rolling all the pet hair up into damp, disgusting balls of dark mats. Yes, it has been a productive and happy day in the Indiana household. Ask the dogs. As I write, my bare feet sink into cold, damp carpet, the cuffs of my cargo pants are slightly bedraggled.

I retreated from the misadventures of cleaning to immerse myself in writing. There's no help for it, I am no Martha Stewart; I am far more along the lines of Erma Bombeck.

I called Keith earlier and he asked me, in the course of the conversation, when was the last time I had been to the garage.

"Oh, a long time ago," I replied carelessly. Oops.

"Woman!" he protested. "How do you know the HD is still there?"

"Um," I began, laughing. "I don't know. Because misplacing a truck that weighs more than a few tons is difficult to do?"

I went into the garage with him on the phone, just to put his worried mind at ease. It's a cold day today, chill and overcast and in the garage, the air was damp and cold.

"Oh my god!" I exclaimed, flipping on the overhead lights, "the truck is gone! I can't believe they took the Ford!"

Which earned me the looked for response of laughter. The Ford is his friend's truck and the ribbing they give each other over their chosen brand of truck is on-going and will be so indefinitely.

I have a confession: I have forgotten what kissing is like. This kind of forgetting always takes me by surprise. After all, when kisses are a dime a dozen, it's easy to assume that like the taste of PB&J, kisses will always be an inherent part of one's sensory knowledge. And there are so many kinds of kisses.

There are the spontaneous kisses, when it dawns on one that the man, the adored, flesh and blood man is in the house, and the impulse to kiss him sweeps over one and one goes in search of him. Or when he snakes his arm out as one is passing by, absentminded, on the way upstairs. Caught, one is pulled in close to where he is sitting and he asks, "Woman, do I have to put up the toll gate again? Where are my kisses?"

Then, of course, there are the other kind of kisses, the ones that are like the tide, sweeping one out into the deeper, more turbulent waters, and it thrills me down to my toes, to feel the strength of this current, to know that my man will pull me out and tumble me head over heels in it, like riding the ocean waves into the shore.

How can one forget such a thing? But it happens. I wake up one day and imagine meeting Keith at the airport lobby, I imagine myself on tiptoes, searching through the crowd, my hair pulled back and shinning in the lights. I imagine seeing the anxious look on his face as he is looking for me, his unmistakable gait and then running and then...and then I realize that I have forgotten what it is like to kiss him.

So, any of you out there who are reading this, whose man is near, within reach; go! Go and kiss him, because you can, because he is there, because you love him. Kiss the children, kiss the dogs. Kiss mom and dad. Mistletoe is not necessary.

As for me, I must go back to the misadventures of house cleaning, Erma Bombeck-style.